


the lullaby will become a lull

by kimaracretak



Category: Under The Pendulum Sun - Jeannette Ng
Genre: F/F, Insomnia, Introspection, Masturbation, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-10-16
Packaged: 2020-12-20 19:24:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21061913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/pseuds/kimaracretak
Summary: I worried over those thoughts in the sleepless nights where I did not dream and did not see Ariel or her corpse of birds. Without a dream, how was I to remember her? Without Mab, how was I supposed to survive with only one mirror in Catherine Helstone's - in my brother?Something was missing.





	the lullaby will become a lull

**Author's Note:**

> And all the dreams that you dream of  
Will soothe you like a velvet glove  
— 'Beware the Touch', Hannah Fury
> 
> Ladiesbingo2019, 'Insomnia'

I stopped dreaming after we set foot in Pivot.

No more did Ariel sit at the foot of my bed, her knitting a pile of snakes writhing in her sunlit lap. No more did Mab run through the mists with my brother clinging to her hand, with myself alongside them stretched across the back of a grey horse still unable to keep up. No more did I stand in empty doorways, waiting for the fish-moon or Catherine Helstone's sister or Mab's owl-faced couriers or -

It should have been a gift. It would have been, if I had slept soundly in the dreams' stead.

But in Pivot, the wheels of the great clock ticked over in the place of my sinner's heartbeat, and I did not sleep at all.

We had windows, in our house, and they looked out not into nothingness but into the bright brass city. Light gleamed over gears and danced like tightropes between the towers of gold that spiraled up to the hollow sky. Under such light, who could possibly sleep?

Laon and I papered over them with pages from Jacob Roche's journals, and the parchments filled with our own writing. The glue stuck our hands together, and when I pulled away the skin of our fingertips came with me.

It felt a little too obvious, even for Mab.

I was waiting for her, in those first days. I don't know if I realised it, or if Laon did, but what else could we have done? She placed the one thing we had both most desired in front of us, welcomed us into her city, and then abandoned us. Did she not want to see what we would do with her gift?

I worried over those thoughts in the sleepless nights where I did not dream and did not see Ariel or her corpse of birds. Without a dream, how was I to remember her? Without Mab, how was I supposed to survive with only one mirror in Catherine Helstone's - in my brother?

Something was missing. I pressed my forehead to the cracks in our window-paper and rested my hand at my throat. It still seemed beyond belief that it was a human hand made of human bone and skin - Laon had made his peace with his love, and sometimes I thought I had made my peace with mine - and yet.

Something inside me rebelled at the thought. It was the idea of humanity, not love that stuck in my throat and bid me reconsider. I wanted Changeling hands, that could bleed onto red threads and remake Ariel Davenport whole from the remnants of her I had stolen in the mist. I wanted Changeling lips, that could press against Mab's and draw secrets like breath from her throat.

I had Laon. The perversity of that want should have been enough to drive all other blasphemous loves from the heart I was still unsure I had.

It wasn't.

Perhaps it would have been better if I could dream. For all I did not appreciate Mab's meddling with my thoughts, it had been the one true way I could reach her, and now, with the absence of sleep, all possibility of the dreams had fled as well.

Oh, I was not that much a fool, I knew she could reach me if she wanted to - but she didn't. And I did not much like being ignored.

I tried to sleep. I mixed all the teas I could think of, and no small amounts of Laon's communion wine, salvaged from the chapel at Gethsemane. I knelt on polished metal sheets of gold and prayed until my knees were numb and my eyelids were sandpaper pieces whenever I blinked.

And still sleep did not come; and neither did Mab. Ariel didn't come, either, though I don't know that I truly expected her.

I wrote her a letter, one of the nights when I'd lost count of the days I'd spent awake. It wasn't an apology, and it wasn't the whole of our story, but enough was there. How I had stayed in Gethsemane after she had died. How Mab had lied to us both. How I loved her.

If I had asked Laon, he could have told me where loving a Changeling, loving a woman, lay on the list of sins I had committed since arriving in Arcadia. But I was far past the point of caring, and I knew even if I had yet to admit to myself that it was not only the insomnia that led me to that state.

I dreamed - hallucinated, surely, because I would have known if I had slept - of Mab's lips at my throat. But it was only Laon, shaking me awake, glancing sidelong at the crumpled pages covered in Enochian littering the desk under my scarred, ink-stained wrists.

I was far more fluent in the language than him, even then. I don't know what he made out, other than Ariel's name, but all he said was, "She would appreciate that. The memory. I think Changelings were more memory than flesh."

I did not ask him what, then, that meant for the time during which we had believed I was a Changeling. I thought about the fading sensation of Ariel's bloody skin on my hands, and of lies within lies, and of the way in which my body was caving in upon itself in the clock's city, and sent him away.

My body, real or unreal, wanted to stitch Ariel Davenport's back together. My body, real or unreal, wanted to dig into Mab's skin and find an answer - a truth - of the sort that I did not know how to ask her for. My body was fading, lack of sleep hollowing out my eyes and elongating my fingers, until every time I glimpsed my reflection in one of Pivot's polished services I thought I resembled one of Mab's masques more than myself.

Once upon a time seeing Laon's face would have reassured me that at least something of myself remained in this world, but Pivot - or perhaps my sleeplessness - had broken something of the link between us. Laon was working to convert one of the empty buildings into a church for the flock he still believed he would find, and I spent nights alone in the bed big enough for three, my hand between my legs and visions of Ariel and Mab swimming in front of my sightless eyes.

Mab knew. I knew she did. I was in her city, behind her doors and in front of her mirrors, and absent from her dreams, and it was driving me to tie myself into shapes I had never imagined, wondering when she would finally do something about it.

My eyelids dropped shut over and over again, over my eyes of brass. My fingers slipped inside myself as easily as the knife had slipped into Ariel's skin. It wasn't the same. It hurt the same. My body was silk and blood and the memory of times I had never been touched, and the pleasure from my own hand was as empty as the void beyond the door to Mab's dreams.

I began drawing, faces in the margins of the translations that had slowed to match the new sugar-thick pace of my exhausted days. I wrote captions underneath: the mist-spinner, the bloody needle, the salted gaoler.

Days meant nothing under the pendulum sun, but I gave Ariel one inked face, and one name, for every day I had known her. It was the only thing that made this new mockery of a life worth it: I had refused even Laon entry to my room.

When Mab finally came through the door to empty air, I was determined to have something worthy to show her. She would not save me, and I would not save Ariel, but the three of us together would sleep.


End file.
